Honestly, the only thing really keeping me from watching shorts is the perplexing UX decision to not show the channel name as part of the preview tile. As basic Internet hygiene it just feels real bad to click on a video without the tiniest bit of idea about its provenance. For that reason I never do and have always just wanted to hide Shorts altogether.
I want long form, well researched, well put together content. These types of content takes a long time to produce, unfortunately, and the youtube algorithm doesn't favour it.
Unless they're AI slop, of course. Between shorts and AI slop, worthwhile content on YouTube will soon become almost impossible to find...
Over the years, i've curated a lot of subscriptions on youtube of such long form content (talking about things like Primitive Technology, Smarter Everyday, etc).
It simply sucks that youtube has gutted the UI for subscriptions - the layout is horrible, i can't scan it as they removed the list view, etc. And sometimes subscribed channel's videos don't even show up there - you have to visit the channel page directly to see the new videos.
it's almost as if they want people to rely only on the home page and the recommended videos from their algo.